


where are you? / i'm with you

by pyrrhic_victory



Series: Good Omens Oneshots [5]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Crying, Ducks, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, M/M, Nightmares, POV Crowley (Good Omens), Post-Apocalypse, Religious Guilt, Sad with a Happy Ending, Sharing a Bed, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 09:20:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20374408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrrhic_victory/pseuds/pyrrhic_victory
Summary: His love goes in cycles, a constant circle; a serpent biting its tail.“Where do you go?” Crowley asks.“When?”“Sometimes you get a look on your face like you’re somewhere else.”“Do I? I’m terribly sorry.” He turns over and kisses him. “I’m with you, my dear. Always you.”Six thousand years is a long time to watch the world ache.





	where are you? / i'm with you

**Author's Note:**

> 'How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.' - Dorothy L Sayers.

There are times when Crowley resents Aziraphale. Sometimes it’s a quiet sort of seething annoyance that bubbles up when he’s being just a bit too sanctimonious or fussy or condescending, a feeling that goes away in a few hours or days. Sometimes it’s plunging, cold disappointment that won’t let him rest for even a second, and follows him for much, much longer. His love goes in cycles, a constant circle; a serpent biting its tail. 

At the start of the cycle, he watches Aziraphale in his natural habitat. (In other lifetimes it’s been a busy marketplace or a quiet scribe’s hut or a Roman bathhouse. In this life, the bookshop or the Ritz or the park.) There’s always a quiet shadow he can slip into and watch while going unwatched. Unnoticed. It’s never for more than a few minutes, and only once every few years, but he can’t help himself. He’ll watch him talk to young couples and old women and bitter youth with the same earnest kindness. He’ll watch him do small things for them when he sees them struggling. Never obvious, never flashy, just a few coins quietly appearing here and there or flowers blooming in a dying garden. He sees him smiling and integrating and spreading light and rolls his eyes, and then falls a little bit more in love. 

And then he comes out of the shadows and speaks to him, and he sees pettiness and selfishness edge out. Little comments here and there, eye rolls and pointed looks when he thinks nobody’s watching. Nobody except Crowley. Small indulgences, selfish moments. And Crowley loves it. He gets to see the rude bits, the not-strictly-angelic bits that aren’t made of squishy love and all-encompassing goodwill. It makes him feel real. 

And the cycle continues. Crowley falls further. He does things for him. Little favours, miracles. Things he needn’t do and they both know it, but neither acknowledge. He bares himself, a little more every time, but never enough to really, truly expose it, because neither of them will say the words. Aziraphale remains polite, always polite and sometimes friendly, and sometimes he leans very close and Crowley knows he’s thinking the same thing, but then he pulls away and carries on about his meal or a book or this or that. There’s a fine balance. 

This cycle always pushes him towards disappointment. It’s not always for the same reasons. Sometimes he tires of hearing Heaven’s manifesto of love when its hands are bathed in blood; after the Flood, after Sodom and Gomorrah, he can’t stand to be around him, not when he’s followed orders like that. Sometimes, Aziraphale is just cruel. _ You’re a demon, that’s what you do. You go too fast for me. I don’t even like you. We’re not friends. We’re on opposite sides _. The illusion shatters. He is not a being of pure light and love, he is not some untouchable incorruptible thing. He is cruel, and selfish, and afraid of being wrong. 

Crowley backs off, he boils in resentment because it’s easier than love. Years pass with this tainted image of Aziraphale. He is tainted. He is cruel, because Heaven is cruel, and how could he not be? How could Crowley have been fooled into thinking he was any different just because he’s polite to him, and nice to a few humans, here and there?

But he always comes back. He finds something he knows Aziraphale would like, and the disappointment fades to longing. He finds himself slinking through the shadows, and there he is, shining in the morning light with a book tucked under his arm and blooming with kindness, but none of it is for Crowley. He falls all over again nonetheless. 

He wonders if the image of himself Aziraphale shows him is more real than the image he shows them. 

Sometimes, there will be an odd thing that doesn’t fit. It is neither cruel nor kind or selfish nor selfless, and Crowley doesn’t quite know what to make of it. Once, he sees Aziraphale sitting in a tavern somewhere in Rome, talking to an old soldier. There is no laughter, no light, he just talks to him the way old men who have seen too much talk. He can’t hear them, but he knows the look. Aziraphale’s eyes are impossibly tired, weighed down by millennia of other people’s tragedies, and Crowley feels like a fool for ever thinking he was like the other angels. But then a plate of grapes arrives and the ancient look on his face falters, and Crowley wonders if he imagined it ever being there. 

He knows, vaguely, that he’s doing this to himself. He shouldn’t keep idolising Aziraphale, romanticising him to the point of sainthood. He may be an angel, but so was Crowley, once, and he’s only letting himself in for disappointment when this angel turns out to be more human than anything. Still, he watches, and tempts, and feels the sting of rejection with cold disappointment, and still, he comes back. Sometimes the cycle takes years. Sometimes, hours. 

And then, one day, the rejection doesn’t come. 

The cycle has begun again since they argued, before Armageddon. They’ve just been out to the Ritz. He’s been light all through dinner, ever since he sat down beside him at Berkeley Square, in fact. Crowley smiles at him over the table, and doesn’t hesitate to drive him to the shop. He steps over the threshold and breathes in the smell of his home, and radiates contentment Crowley wishes he knew how to feel. This is as close as he can get. 

Then comes the indulgence, the pettiness, Aziraphale opening a few bottles and grinning at how terrified the demons in Hell were. He braces himself for the cruelty and the disappointment. It’s coming soon, he knows. But Aziraphale just turns to him with hope shining on his face and says, “I love you, I’m afraid. Did you know?” 

Did he? And Crowley, spluttering and then silent, looks at him. He is saying something beautiful, and something cruel. The weight of it is ancient and there’s a ghost of that look on his face that he gets sometimes where he disappears inside himself. Crowley doesn’t know where he goes. “Yeah,” he says, not because he knew but because he hoped for so long that it almost felt like knowing. “Yeah, me too.” 

Things are simpler after that. Well, not really. But they’re both on the same page now. That has to count for something. Crowley isn’t without Aziraphale, most days. But there are times when Aziraphale is without himself, when he becomes ancient and stares out of the window or at a book and sees absolutely nothing. And then Crowley will shift or the door will open and he’ll blink and come back to the surface. 

“Where do you go?” Crowley asks, when they’re lying in bed and he’s shaken himself out of that trance again. It seems to be happening more often. Or perhaps Crowley is just around to see it. Or, Crowley quietly wonders, perhaps he’s just _ allowed _to see it. 

“When?” 

“Sometimes you get a look on your face like you’re somewhere else.” 

“Do I? I’m terribly sorry.” He turns over and kisses him. “I’m with you, my dear. Always you.” 

He is. They go out, they eat and walk together. It is no longer under the guise of business, or of anything. It is just because they want to. Sometimes they go to Crowley’s flat, and Crowley gets in a good bit of yelling time with his plants. Aziraphale sneaks in behind him to whisper kind things to them, and suddenly he’s back at the beginning again, watching him gleam from the shadows. Most of the time, they sit in the shop or the small flat above it, together. 

Crowley convinces him to get a television in the back room. This is not entirely accurate; he buys a television and installs it and Aziraphale fusses for the rest of the day about modern technology when he tries to teach him how the remote works. He takes to watching the news on it rather quickly, though. He doesn’t sleep, not even when Crowley curls around him in bed and refuses to let him go for hours on end, so in the early hours when Crowley is still drowsing, he gets up and watches the news with some cocoa and a book. He always has the volume turned up just high enough to stop Crowley from going back to sleep. Crowley suspects this is on purpose. 

One morning, as usual, he gives in and slouches out of bed. He saunters down to the usual sight of Aziraphale in his armchair with a mug of cocoa and the news on. But he’s got that distant look on again, and he doesn’t even notice Crowley coming until he touches his shoulder. 

“Good morning,” he says, trying to smile brightly and missing by just an inch. Crowley glances at the television. There’s some flooding in Yorkshire from heavy autumn rains. 

“Where were you, just now?” Crowley asks. “You were miles away.” 

“Just waiting for you,” Aziraphale smiles, but his eyes flicker to the window without seeing beyond it. The story changes to something about politics and the television, sensing what’s good for it, switches off. Aziraphale blinks and frowns up at him. “I was watching that.” 

Crowley slumps on the sofa opposite him. “You weren’t. You disappeared again. Off in your own little world.“ One might think that after six thousand years of avoiding how he feels for Crowley, Aziraphale has started avoiding it in a whole new way. Since he can’t physically avoid him, he’s started imagining himself away instead. 

“If you must know, I was thinking about the Flood.” 

Crowley stops. That was one of the times in their history that he’d been somewhat disappointed in Aziraphale. There was no logic behind it, really, except that he’d expected a bit more of that rebellious kindness that led to him giving away the sword, and he was faced instead with obedient passivity. 

“What about it?” 

Aziraphale shakes his head. “Just thinking. The flooding in Yorkshire reminded me, that’s all.” 

“Is that what you always think about, when you go off daydreaming?” Crowley asks. 

“I’m not daydreaming,” Aziraphale fussily says. “I‘m just thinking. Remembering. That’s all.” He sips his cocoa, and the moment is gone, and he’s all light and softness again. “Did you sleep well?” 

He does, mostly. When nightmares find him now, he wakes up shuddering, with firm, soft hands on his back and in his hair. He wonders if that’s why Aziraphale stays with him at night, since he never seems to sleep himself, and resents him for it. He resents him being so thoughtful and gentle when he’s this wretched, tortured thing that’s barely worthy to look at him.

“You deserve better,” Crowley mumbles one night, when his mind is thick with smoke and the sheets around him are tangled and sweaty. Aziraphale goes stiff, his hands pausing their patient motion on his back. 

“What?” 

Crowley tries to turn away, but Aziraphale won’t let him move. “Forget it.” 

“No.” Crowley sighs and slumps back onto his chest. He’s sticky with a cold sweat, but Aziraphale doesn’t complain. “There is no-one better than you. Not to me.” He says it so factually, like he hasn’t spent six thousand years choosing Heaven over him, and only stopped very recently when he couldn’t choose them anymore. Resentment burns. 

“Don’t be stupid.” 

Aziraphale kisses the top of his head, breathing in his sweaty hair. He’s become a bit obsessed with it, lately, always stroking it or combing his fingers through it or kissing it. It’s difficult to stay angry with him when he’s doing things like that, and when he’s not quite sure what he’s angry about. “I want you, no matter how poorly you think of yourself. I suppose that makes me selfish.”

Crowley snorts. “Makes you stupid.”

Aziraphale exhales and it ruffles his hair. He’s decided to be patient tonight, it seems. Another day he might have told him off for having bad manners, or just huffed or tutted and changed the subject. “Perhaps. But I want you anyway. And for some reason, you seem to want me.” 

“Of course I sodding want you.” Crowley pushes himself up onto his elbows and stares at Aziraphale, who smiles a bit sadly. 

“Then we needn’t worry about silly ideas like _ deserving _. I hope it’s enough that we want each other.” 

“You hope it’s enough?” 

“I hope it’s enough for you.” Aziraphale’s hands drop from Crowley’s hair, resting uncertainly on his shoulders. Crowley leans forward a bit and kisses him, and then settles back against his chest. Warm arms encircle him again. 

“You are.”

In the morning Crowley takes him to the park. Aziraphale is made to be in the sunlight, and Crowley basks in it. He’s back at the beginning again, with Aziraphale gleaming love and Crowley watching as if behind a screen. They feed the ducks. It’s almost ridiculous how normal it is; they’re an angel and a demon, six thousand years old. They’ve seen cities and civilisations rise and fall, they’ve seen wars and floods and been to Hell and back, and here they are by a dinky little pond with a bag of breadcrumbs, feeding the ducks. 

He bursts out laughing. Aziraphale gives him a confused look and glances around at the park.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. Just us, here. Bloody ducks.“ 

Aziraphale frowns. “What about ducks?” 

Crowley shrugs and throws a large chunk of bread into the water. “Ducks don’t know the difference between St James’ Park and the Roman Empire. S’all the same to them, isn’t it?” 

“Ah._ How fleeting are all human passions compared to the massive continuity of ducks, _” Aziraphale quotes. 

“Right. Exactly. And there’s us.” 

“What about us?” 

Crowley watches the water, now. He might have entered a dangerous territory. “Not a lot of things stay the same for six thousand years. There’s ducks. Human stupidity, of course. And us.” 

“We haven’t stayed the same,” Aziraphale says. He links his hand with Crowley’s, and kisses him like he’s flaunting him in front of the ducks to prove his point. _ We didn’t do _ this _ in Ancient Rome. _

“Maybe not,” Crowley concedes. _ We could have _. “But we stayed.” 

Aziraphale still runs the shop most days, and as much as Crowley loves him, he‘s too restless to sit around watching him watch his customers suspiciously and shuffle books around. So when he gets bored, and Aziraphale isn’t responding to his pestering, he goes back to his flat to yell at his plants and watch television. It’s painful to realise how difficult it is to be apart from him for even a few hours. It is usually only a few hours at a time, since Aziraphale always calls him when he closes up and asks him out to dinner. But those hours worry him. What’s going to happen when they argue and break apart again? Is he going to be able to last another eighty years of silence? He drives, he causes petty nuisances in supermarkets. But then Aziraphale calls. He always does. 

Until he doesn’t. Six o’clock comes and goes, and he doesn’t call. Seven. Eight. Crowley can’t hear himself think over the pounding fear. Nine. At ten, he gets in the car. If he was more polite, he might have taken the silence as a sign that Aziraphale is just busy, or doesn’t want to see him. But because he’s a demon, and he’s terrified that he’ll drive around the corner to see flames spitting out of the windows again, he goes. 

The shop is closed, the blinds are drawn, the lights are off. He tries the handle, and the door swings open. 

He finds him upstairs in the end. He’s leaning over the bathroom sink, staring at the water thundering down into the plughole, holding onto the basin like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. He looks exhausted down to the core, he‘s got that empty, distant look he gets more and more often these days. Crowley pushes the door open wider, and the movement in his periphery seems to finally stir him. He slowly turns his head, then flinches back and hastens to turn off the tap. 

“Crowley.” His voice is deadened and quiet. That ancient look doesn’t fade. Crowley doesn’t know what to do. His instinct is to approach, to hold him, but there’s something so tense and brittle about him that Crowley wonders if he might shatter at the wrong touch. 

“Where are you?” 

Aziraphale shoots out an irritated breath and tries to pass him. “I’m in my bathroom, Crowley.“ 

Crowley stops him with a hand on his chest. This is happening too often for Aziraphale to keep shutting him out like this. Crowley has crawled across the bed into his arms after so many nightmares now. Aziraphale should be able to come to him, shouldn’t he? The angel sighs and closes his eyes. They don’t age, so he knows there’s nothing physically different about him, but he looks older, somehow. 

He moves Crowley’s hand from his chest by taking it in both of his own, trying to be reassuring. “I just got lost in thought. You know me, always with my head in the clouds. I really didn’t mean to worry you.” 

Crowley is not convinced. “Well, next time you get lost, tell me and I’ll find you.” Aziraphale blinks up at him. “I mean it. Wherever you are, I’ll find you.” 

He looks like he’s in desperate need of sleep, or of falling against Crowley’s chest and letting himself be held, for once. But he just pats Crowley’s hand and smiles. “I think you’ve rescued me often enough for a lifetime.” 

It gets worse. Sometimes it only lasts a moment, a brief look out of the window or a few seconds lost staring at his plate. But there are days where it will fill a whole conversation. Crowley will talk, and Aziraphale will talk back, but neither of them will be there, because Aziraphale is lost somewhere in his head and Crowley is trying to figure out where, and why now, and what he can do to drag him back out.

He can feel resentment building again, only this time it’s difficult to sink into it, like a pair of shoes he’s outgrown. He hates that Aziraphale won’t just tell him what he’s thinking when he disappears from behind his eyes. He hates that he doesn’t know why it keeps happening. He hates that he’s suffering. Most of all, he hates himself for not being able to do something about it. 

They’re in the back room when Aziraphale fades out midway through a conversation about an awful party they met at in the fourteenth century. Rain starts to fall outside. Crowley sighs and gets up. He can’t keep doing this. He puts his hands on either side of Aziraphale’s face and that wakes him again with a startled look. 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he quietly says. Crowley balances on the armrest and strokes his hair. Aziraphale won’t relax into it, he never does when he’s like this, but he doesn’t push him away, either. Crowley’s hands fall nonetheless, and he gets up again. 

“Where do you keep going?” He asks. Aziraphale looks away, watching the rain trickling down the windowpanes. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” he murmurs, still inescapably, infuriatingly, not _there._ Resentment boils. 

“Then why does it feel like you’re not here anymore?” He doesn’t mean to snap, but he can’t hold it back anymore. There is a part of him that is built to be angry and bitter and it’s clawing its way up to the surface. Aziraphale stares at him, his mouth partly open with shock and pain and so much guilt that Crowley steps back. “No, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have.” Crowley sighs and slumps back down on the sofa. 

“No,” Aziraphale says. He sniffs and straightens himself up a bit, but he still looks impossibly sad. “No, you’re right. I haven’t been treating you properly. I’ve been distant, I know. I apologise.” 

“Don’t apologise, angel. Just tell me what’s wrong. If I’ve done something, if this isn’t working out, I’d rather you just told me.” He wouldn’t, but he can’t face living with the uncertainty anymore. 

“What? Oh. Oh, goodness, Crowley, no.” Aziraphale shoots up and presses a kiss to his hand. “No, no. It isn’t you. It isn’t this. I’m so sorry, I should have said.” He runs his hands through his hair and does what he always does: reassures Crowley, and makes it so Crowley cannot reassure him. 

“Please.” Crowley grabs his wrists and pulls him down to sit next to him on the sofa. “Tell me where you are.”

“I’m in the bookshop, with you.” Aziraphale’s voice wavers. He’s pleading, begging Crowley not to keep asking. But Crowley can’t let him fade into himself like this anymore. 

“Tell me, Aziraphale. Please.” 

Aziraphale sighs. His hands go limp in Crowley’s. Rain patters gently on the windows, and Aziraphale tries to look at it, but Crowley raises his hand to his jaw and nudges his face back. Eventually, he settles for staring into his lap, where his hands knot together and twitch. 

“I’m at the Flood,” he says, so quietly that it might not have been anything more than a whimper. And Crowley understands, a little bit. News reports and flowing taps and rainfall. Aziraphale breathes in, and steels himself, and continues. “And at Sodom and Gomorrah. The Israelites in the desert. Pompeii. The burning of Rome. The wars, the massacres, the famines, the suffering. The trenches in the Great War.” 

He sounds so tired. Crowley understands a little bit more. He’s not like the other angels. Of course he’s watched the agony of the human race and felt it within himself, too. He grieves wounds whose owners have long since turned to dust, because he simply feels too much to let it go. Crowley returns to the start of the cycle again. 

_ “Angel,” _ he sighs and tries to pull him close, but Aziraphale won’t go. He sits up straight, not looking at Crowley. 

“You don’t see it.” That stings, a bit. He still doesn’t think Crowley is capable of real compassion. 

”I do. I might not be an angel, but I was there too. I know how it feels to watch them make the same mistakes over and over again. Feels like they’ll never learn.”

Aziraphale sighs. “No, you don’t understand. It’s not them.” He glances at Crowley briefly, and then away, at the room, at the door. Like he’s checking his escape route. “I think I might be a very bad person.” 

“What?” 

Aziraphale shakes his head. “I could have saved them all if I wasn’t a coward.”

Crowley is suddenly very afraid. “Don’t be stupid,” he gently says. “I know you bent the rules sometimes, to help.” 

“Not enough!” Aziraphale turns to him sharply. His hands are shaking, his voice rises and falls with emotion. “You want to know where I go, Crowley? I go to the Flood and I see children running past me who are going to drown. I go to the trenches and I have to watch soldier after soldier die of wounds that I could have healed like _ that- _“ he clicks his fingers, and tries to carry on but only a desperate moan comes out. He covers his mouth. He stays rigid, distant. He isn’t letting Crowley help. 

Crowley stares at him, really looks. He resented him for not caring more about the Flood. Now, he realises that he was just as forbidden from caring about all of this as Crowley was, and he cared just as violently anyway. He just never let himself mourn, because he blamed himself. He still does. 

“Aziraphale.” He takes his hands, trembling oddly in his lap. “You know if you disobeyed like that enough times you’d have ended up dead. You know that.” 

“Wouldn’t that have been worth it? I could have saved thousands if I wanted.” 

“Don’t you dare,” Crowley growls. “Heaven would have struck them all down again anyway.”

“You don’t know that,” Aziraphale whines, snatching back his hands and lowering his head into them.

“Yes, I do, and so do you.” Crowley shuffles closer, so his thigh presses against Aziraphale’s. “You can’t do this. You can mourn them, yeah, but then you _ move on. _ You can’t blame yourself for not fixing every bit of suffering on the planet.” He remains still, silent. Crowley leans closer. “You have to let it out.” 

“No!” Aziraphale sits up and there are tears gathering thickly in his eyes. “I can’t just forget.” His whole body is stiff, waiting to shatter, full of six thousand years of human anguish and refusing to let even a single drop escape. 

“I’m not asking you to. Just let go of the guilt.”

He breathes shakily and stares down at the floor. “I don’t deserve to.”

“I thought we were done with _ silly ideas like deserving. _ You don’t owe them your bloody suffering!” Aziraphale won’t look at him. Crowley sighs. “If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me. Sod what you deserve. I want you, no matter what you think of yourself. Maybe that makes me selfish.” 

“I’m afraid it makes you rather stupid,” Aziraphale says, half-choking on the words as he tries to smile. Tears are trickling down his face now and he’s shaking with the effort of staying upright, holding himself together. 

“Maybe. But I still want you. Is that enough?” He needs Aziraphale to understand. Through all his kindness and pettiness and selfishness, through the absent-minded cruelty and the resentment and the love, Crowley wants him. He doesn’t care what either of them deserves. 

Rain hammers on the windows outside, and Aziraphale shatters. Crowley gathers the broken pieces into his lap and holds them.

He lets Aziraphale cry for as long as he needs to. At first, he trembles and shakes and his body is wracked with shuddering breaths, but as the minutes tick by he settles. Crowley feels silent tears dampening his knee. He strokes Aziraphale’s hair the way Aziraphale strokes his after a nightmare, and lets him cry. It’s like disinfecting a wound; it hurts and it’s miserable and you wish you didn’t have to do it, but afterwards, the wound might heal a little cleaner.

The silence turns from terrifying to peaceful, and eventually, the shaking and the weeping slows to nothing. Crowley keeps stroking his hair, and Aziraphale sighs. He rises slowly from his lap with an undignified sort of sniff, and looks up at Crowley. 

“Terribly sorry,” he says, in a rough voice, trying for a self-deprecating smile. His eyes are red at the edges and he looks properly exhausted. 

“Do you even know what you’re apologising for?” Aziraphale just shakes his head. Crowley produces a handkerchief from the ether and flourishes it at Aziraphale like one of his awful magic tricks, and he snorts. Crowley shifts his legs to regain a bit of feeling after being pinned down by an angel for the past hour, while said angel dabs at his eyes. 

“I don’t want things to change,” Aziraphale says, crumpling the handkerchief in his lap. 

“Too bad,” Crowley says, not unkindly. Aziraphale tuts. “Things can’t always stay the same. All that matters to me is that you stay.”

Aziraphale looks at him with trepidation. “And what if I can’t?”

“Then tell me where you’re going, and I’ll come with you.” Crowley stands, and holds out his hand. “Come to bed?” Aziraphale nods once, and goes with him.

Things stay the same. They go out to eat, they walk. Crowley drives too fast and Aziraphale complains about it every time. They sit in the back room of the shop and drink. Aziraphale gets up first and puts on the news until Crowley comes down to switch it off. But things change, too. When Aziraphale gets that faraway look, Crowley taps him on the wrist and asks, _ hey, where are you? _ And Aziraphale tells him. _ The Flood, the trenches, the Crusades, the Blitz, the Hundred Years’ War._ He sleeps, sometimes, though not nearly as often as Crowley thinks he should. When he wakes not knowing where he is, he lets Crowley wrap his arms around him and remind him.

They visit St James’ Park. Aziraphale miracles up some birdseed for the ducks. He saw a segment on the news once that said bread is bad for them, actually, and he hasn’t shut up about it since. 

“I don’t think they mind,” Crowley says, watching a duck gracefully dip down under the surface to retrieve its lunch. 

“Well, I do. It’s the principle of the thing,” Aziraphale firmly says. 

“Principles? I can’t be seen with someone who has principles!” Crowley exclaims, frightening off a couple of the less seasoned ducks. Several very unsuspicious men in unsuspicious suits look up from their unsuspicious conversations. Aziraphale tuts and continues throwing seed into the pond, but he’s smiling. “What?” 

“Oh, nothing.” Crowley watches his eyes fade into the past again, but the smile remains. It’s a fond smile, and an old one. 

Crowley leans over and brushes against his shoulder. “Where are you?” 

Aziraphale looks at him like he’s enjoying an inside joke with himself. “I’m with you.” And he tells him about Rome, and Wessex, and London, and Paris. Long rambling tangents of _ do you remember? and there was that time we went there, wasn’t there? oh, do you remember? _ Things Crowley hasn’t thought of in centuries, things no human will ever know happened now, but the memories come back to Aziraphale as though he’s still there. And Crowley listens. 

Six thousand years and the only thing he’s managed to love is standing next to him, rambling about this one lovely dish they made in Mesopotamia and he can’t remember what it was called or what it was made of, but he can remember just how lovely it tasted. Aziraphale is kind, and cruel, and petty, and loving, but he is also just this: life. Just living on and on after the world he loves so hard has turned to dust and built itself up into a new one that he will love again. It seems exhausting to Crowley, to feel so much. To remember so much.

There’s a gentle tap at his elbow, and Aziraphale is watching him. “You drifted for a moment, dear. Where were you?”

Crowley takes his hand, slots their fingers together and watches a duck bob up to the surface. “Same as always, angel. Next to you.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! that quote about ducks always makes me think of good omens, so of course i had to find a way to make it painful. i wrote this while working on the last chapter of my long fic, which will be up sometime in the next week and is a real bitch to write. my tumblr, if you want to send me hate for making ducks angsty: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/anxiousvictor99 - alex.


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